


The Folly of Cars

by marvinmartian



Category: Cars (Pixar Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24955549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marvinmartian/pseuds/marvinmartian
Summary: It's not another day in Radiator Springs. Death hangs in the air like a dense fog, Sally's hot butch college roommate has shown up, and Lightning is on the brink of an existential crisis. Will they find the dark and evil hidden in the scorching asphalt and azure skies of their Arizona paradise-- or will /it/ find them first?
Relationships: Original Character/Sally Carrera, Sally Carrera/Lightning McQueen
Kudos: 6





	1. CONVOY

The sky over Radiator Springs was magnificent, as golden and optimistic as any other day. Of course it is, Lightning McQueen thought, staring out at the day's tender first beams of sunlight from the road in front of Mater's Tow and Salvage. He took a sip of his steaming hot mug of gasoline, his eyes bloodshot, his thoughts dismal. Nature, he believed, knew nothing of the folly of Cars.  


"Need a light?"  


Lightning looked over his shoulder. A burgundy Dodge Charger he didn't recognize drove up to him, flashing him a smile bright enough to make him think it was midday.  


"Uh, no thanks. I don't smoke," he said, "anything." He wasn't in the mood to talk to his fans today, even if the fan in particular was a gorgeous vintage muscle car the color of dark cherries. "Sorry," Lightning slurped up the liquid in his mug and began to drive away.  


The Charger was persistent. She shifted into third and blocked his exit.  


"Something bothering you? Sally assured me you were an affable kind of guy." The look in her eye made Lightning uncomfortable. He backed off, suspicious.  


"You know Sally?" His baby-blue eyes, magnified on the windshield, sized the other car up. "What does affable mean?"  


She smiled and extended a wheel. "My name's Vicky. I'm her friend from college."  


"Sally went to college?"  


"Uh. Yeah. She's a lawyer, right?" Vicky laughed. It was charming, despite the earlier odd feeling. Cautiously, he tapped her wheel with his politely, though the rubber trembled with slight nervousness. What if she was uptight and judgmental? What if Sally had dated some other hotrod during her college years, and he was going to seem like just another meaningless fling?  


"I'm Lightning McQueen. Sorry, I didn't mean to be unfriendly, it's just… something really fucked up happened the other night. We're still reeling from it. Did you just get in?"  


As he spoke, her eyes widened, then darted around the buildings that surrounded the two of them- Filmore's Fuel, the Cozy Zone Motel, and Sarge's Surplus- as if trying to commit them to memory. "Mm-hm!" she said, a little abruptly, "I just got in. This morning, actually. Is that why I can't find anyone? This town seems pretty dead."  


"Actually," Lightning glanced around, "it's always like this. But for once, everyone is out of town." He paused, pursing his lips. "My best friend drove into a ravine last night. Burst a fuel tank." His eyes dropped to the asphalt. Vicky watched him with a curious expression, like this wasn't news to her, but he didn't notice- he was lost in thought once again.  


"Are you going to collect his body?" she asked.  


"No, everyone else is-" Lightning looked up suddenly. "This happened to you before?"  


Vicky began to answer, but she was interrupted by a melancholic honk, echoing across the Southwestern landscape.  


Without the town tow truck, the Cars had been forced to improvise. Mater's crushed and mangled body lay on a wooden flat, on wheels, tied to Filmore's rear bumper. On the even road into Radiator Springs, which Lightning had laid down himself, the corpse didn't so much as bounce, like there was a magnetism in death. The procession of Cars was mostly silent, apart from the occasional mournful horn or loud, abrupt sob. Mater had been a staple in their community- quirky, but nonetheless essential. They all wondered what they would do without him. Who would tow their cars? Who would… well, suffice to say, it was a big loss.  


There was also a far more sinister reason for the crowd's silence- it was the silence of stubborn normalcy in the face of aberration, the willful ignorance of some small towns:  


From Mater's corpse protruded an irregular shape. It hung in the air like a dead tree: gangly and white, withered, so far from the brilliance of life no eye, from no windshield, could bear to look at it longer than a few seconds.  


Lightning had seen his fair share of racing accidents- bent bumpers, dented grills, mirrors torn clean off. He had thought that made him tougher than the average Car. Thought wrong, it seemed, as he averted his eyes from the macabre sight of his best friend, a mere husk, nothing more than debris. Vicky, on the other hand, was engrossed by the scene. She watched Mater's body roll by with a calm, discerning expression, like one might regard a small print page.  


"Is there going to be a service?" she asked, after they had turned the corner at the end of the street.  


Lightning shook his hood. "Mater always said he wanted his body to be set on fire on the top of a landfill. We're doing it tomorrow, I think."  


"Of course. My grandmother went the same way." Vicky looked off into the distance, where the familiar red plateaus struck an impress vista against the now-cerulean sky.  


The two sat alongside one another for a long, uncountable moment, studying the landscape thoughtfully. But the moment couldn't last forever. Nothing could, Lightning reflected.  


Sally, a baby blue 2002 911 Porsche Carerra, had appeared at the end of the street. Like a drop of the sky, Lightning thought, his eyes going a little misty. When he looked at her now, there was no preventing the sick, mean thought that she wouldn't be there forever. Their love, as eternal as it had once been to Lightning, was a single moment- a stray rock, a single pebble on the road of life. The bittersweet thought expressed itself on his tongue and he turned away with the bad taste of it.  


"Vic!" Sally's mouth opened in delighted surprise and she sped up to meet the other two outside Mater's strewn carcasses and pseudonymous salvage.  


"Sal!" Vicky responded in kind, quickly and the two Cars embraced each other, somehow.  


"It's been so long!"  


"It really has."  


"When did this happen?" Sally drew back and marveled at Vicky's paint job. Something new, Lightning gathered, watching the interaction with restrained interest. He was happy not to be addressed quite yet, to be the boyfriend in the background.  


"It's not quite brand new," Vicky said, "I'd totally forgotten about it, actually." The familiar way her eyes rolled to the side and traced the gleam of burgundy in her rearview mirrors said otherwise. "There's a lot that's new."  


"Yeah," Sally sighed, stars in her eyes, "I can see that…"  


Lightning frowned. He liked it when Sally looked at him that way, but anybody else? How friendly were these two in college?  


Sally noticed him with a start. "Oh! Lightning, this-" she looked between the two of them, as if only then realizing their proximity to each other. "Well," she laughed embarrassedly, "I guess you've already met."  


"Not properly," Vicky flashed Lightning a meaningful look.  


He felt lost, but whatever this was, the two of them, it would have to wait until later.  


"We met," he said, not adding much.  


"Me and Vicky went to college together."  


"Yeah, I heard. You went to college?" Lightning asked.  


"I was an attorney, Lightning," Sal raised an eyebrow at him reproachfully.  


"Listen," Vicky cleared her throat, "I'm going to check into the hotel. I didn't realize I was coming at such a bad time- but if either of you feel like it, I'd love to get a drink." She looked between them like she was weighing gas choices at the supermarket.  


"Of course, Vic!" Sally replied brightly, "we'd love to come."  


"Yeah…" Lightning stared at Sally, his eyes semi-narrowed. "Love to."  


Vicky grinned, and for a moment, her sheer masculine beauty that put the muscle in muscle car was marred by what seemed like… too many teeth… Then she turned around and drove into the Cozy Cone parking lot, leaving Lightning and Sally in the dust.


	2. AMBULANCE

The next thing to do was to go through Mater's old stuff, and it would take quite a while. They had to clean out his lot, sell off what they could, keep what they wanted. The shop was so strewn with parts, the yard with old chassis and wheels and bumpers, it was hard even for a racecar to tell what was important and what wasn't. While they were occupied with this task, Sally and Lightning decided it would be the best time to have their discussion about Vicky, surrounded by clutter and reasonably secluded from the rest of the town. Nobody liked to see Sal and Lightning fight, and they knew it.  


"I don't understand why you'd invite your old college friend here after our buddy died, Sal. It's just fucking insensitive," Lightning kicked a bucket of bolts over by accident and swore again.  


Sally's eyes would have been damp, if Cars could cry. But by giving up their organic forms, man had also given up the relief and pleasure of tears. "Lightning, please, none of us knew this was going to happen, okay? I thought-"  


"You didn't even tell me she was coming!"  


"I thought you'd get along! I thought it'd be fun, I'm sorry, okay?" Sally stared at the ground, where Mater's tire tracks stared back at her. "I didn't know we'd be having a funeral. She's just… I don't know, she makes me feel really... "  


"Flirty?"  


"No!" Sally's cheeks burned and she twisted around to glare at Lightning. "You're acting like an asshole, okay? We're really good friends and I haven't seen her in forever."  


Lightning scoffed. Hurt flashed across Sally's eyes, though she didn't seem nearly as surprised as he'd hoped- she seemed like she knew she'd made him mad, and that made it worse. She began to back out of the workshop, her brow inverted, trying to keep the tears in. "I want to help you through this, I know you loved Mater. But I can't do that if you lash out at me."  


Why was she talking to him like this? Was this how she dealt with grief? Caretaking?  


For the first time since they'd got together, Lightning was starting to feel tied down- and simultaneously like he might lose her at any second to cherry-red 'Vic'.  


"Get out of here."  


"What?" Sally's voice cracked.  


"Just get out! Go have drinks with Vic." Lightning turned his license plate on her. In his rearview mirror, he saw her start to say something, then think better of it. She turned and drove quietly away, her engine humming miserably.  


Lightning made eye contact with one of the shelves in Mater's workshop, adorned with semi-broken headlights and a very old screwdriver, the paint all chipped. He couldn't explain the bile inside of him, but he tasted it, sour-bitter and evil- Sally, what had she ever done for him? He was the real star in their relationship. She barely had a personality, besides being from California and not being smart enough to make it as a bigger lawyer.  


No… no, that wasn't true.  


Had he ever been happy, or had he just been trying something new? The infinite fancy of novelty. And now Mater was gone, the illusion was shattered, the world had lost its rosy simplicity- replaced the gray of an ugly, mean, gangly limb protruding from a heart wrenching corpse. The generic racecar let out a stifled, choked sob and drove his wheel into one of Mater's splintering cabinets, unable to stay still, at the mercy of his animated feelings.  


The wood broke in on itself and splintered; the doors fell away from the frame, revealing something golden-black, winking in the new light; looking closer Lightning saw that it was moonshine, 190 proof. Mater loved to pour that in his tank, he thought wistfully, and reached for the bottle. 

Out on the street, Sally had begun to 'cry'- tiny, breathy sobs, reminding her of other bitterly sad moments, like hiding in the bathroom at her old California law office when things weren't going right. It was like Lightning had become a completely different person in his grief; she felt betrayed by it, and felt guilty about feeling betrayed. Her sad eyes traced Route 66, but not even the picturesque landscape could bring her out of the funk. She didn't know how she'd go see Vic tonight after all of this. Lightning would throw it back in her face no matter what she did. It was miserable. He'd never made her so unhappy before.  


She hit the gas and started to drive out of town.  


Sure, her boyfriend was fast- in a commercial, competitive kind of way. But being fast was different than wanting to move, and Sally had always prided herself on her ambition, her desire to hit the road when everything else turned into a dead end. She loved to see the asphalt turn into a black ribbon underneath her tires, the fenceposts all blur together, the hills rising up and down like waves, like the nigh-imperceptible sensation of lungs expanding and contracting. She wasn't trying to outrun her emotions, she was trying to feel them.  


For a moment, it worked. As Sally shot down Route 66, her fear and guilt and shame began to dissipate. Freedom was waiting somewhere along the road. Somewhere…  


A white square in the distance.  


A white square, a car, a van, maybe- with red and blue lights. Pulled over.  


Someone in trouble? Sally hit the brakes before she raced past the car- and a good thing, too.  


It was an ambulance. Not just white, but blue and red. It was hard to tell, though, because the front of the car was almost completely charred, as if it had driven through flames. In the side, a great gash, like made by a claw, revealed a brightly lit interior. A stretcher. Indistinct tubes and buttons. His eyes were bloodshot and dark, half-lidded, like it was on the edge of consciousness. Her tires shrieked on the road as she came to a stop in front of the damaged ambulance.  


"Hey!" she whipped around and pulled up next to him on the shoulder. "What's going on, engine troubles?"  


His eyelids opened slowly, moved over to her like a drop of water moving across glass. "That would be ironic, wouldn't it?"  


Sally blinked. "You look hurt. Are you hurt?'  


"These are old wounds, young lady. Trust me. I'm a doctor." He had an even, almost flat tone of voice. She'd never heard anyone like him- like the kind of voice you might hear on a radio show about the history of jazz. "If I was hurt, I wouldn't be idling on the side of the road, looking at the view."  


"What are you doing on Route 66?"  


"It's lovely, isn't it?"  


"Y-yes." Sally's brow furrowed. Tourist? "And Radiator Springs, it's just nearby, is the glorious jewel strung on the necklace of the mother road. That's this," she added, gesturing to the stretch they had just gotten off of.  


"Your stop didn't sound too good. Would you like me to inspect your tires for wear and tear?"  


"Oh, um…" Sally looked down at herself. "I wouldn't want to tear you away from the landscape."  


"It's no trouble at all."  


"If you're sure…" she wasn't sure why, but she felt edgy around this strange ambulance. Was it because of his scars? If so, she'd feel terrible about it. A Car's appearance didn't determine anything about who they were, and this one had clearly been through a lot.  


The ambulance rolled over to her and began checking her tires. As he moved, she heard the orchestra-bell tinkling of medical tools inside of him.  


"My name is Dr. Ren," the ambulance said, friendlessly. He made no effort to shake her wheel. "Dr. Cyrus Ren."  


"Sally Carrera."  


"Oh, yes," the ambulance smiled, and again, there was no joy or warmth in it. "I know who you are, Ms. Carrera."  


"What?"  


"Tell me, how long have you known Vic?"  


"Vic... ? What does she…?"  


A loud puncture sound pierced the air. Sally cried out as the air shot out of one of her tires, a thick syringe poking out of the rubber. Her wheelbase was much too small even without a flat- the axle dropped partially into the sand. Without another wheel and off-road, she was immobilized. Nonetheless, Dr. Cyrus Ren drove around to her other side and pierced her second front wheel.  


"What the hell? What are you doing?!" she screamed, like anyone could hear her so far out in the desert. He punctured her other two tires, her metal body dropping onto the ground like scrap.  


"Ms. Carrera," he said, impossibly soft, "you might feel a slight pinch.'"


	3. RADIO SILENCE

The Prototype lay in the darkness, parsing what they knew and did not know through crude lines of code.  


They were a blind body in space, a fusion of circuitry and parts that acknowledged one another without feeling, a semi-conscious occupation of head, abdomen, and limb. No time- they existed, and so did a series of events which it could, upon demand, string together temporally. The Prototype was not built with the timescale of Men or Cars in mind; they could idle for hours without boredom. Immortal, like the ocean. Enduring, like a mountain.  


The air quality was poor. They could read it with the sensors placed inside their vacuous mouth, across the gums of which stretched a hypersensitive field that took only a quarter of a percent of their power. Nitrogen oxides and volatile organic chemicals pervaded an atmosphere The Prototype understood had once been oxygen. The Prototype knew they had a subroutine with an if condition of pure air quality, though did not know what followed. At any rate, that day seemed impossibly far away.  


Enclosure made the air stagnant, though the Prototype could not comprehend its scale without using their memory- and that was too complex a process for their low-consciousness mode. Sleeping. But not asleep. 

Breathing, not breathing, with no need for oxygen and no swelling, sinking chest. Their inhalations and exhalations were the clicks of an internal switch. They had no dreams. They smelled without smelling, saw without sight, felt without nerves. They were the Prototype: neither man nor machine, but something else. A New life form. The New Man.  


They detected the opening of a distance door, and did not open their eyes. They had not been called. Screams, the screaming of a woman, filled the space. The sharp, death-like smell of burnt rubber quickly followed.  


This was ordinary.  


They heard the doctor murmur, low and unthreatening, like he was talking to an animal. The words didn't matter. The Prototype knew what would come next.  


Soon, it was time. After the grinding, whirring of tools, had faded into nothing, and the screams turned into pitiful whimpers, and the operation halted, only then did the Prototype begin to stir.  


Their master's call needed no sound, just as their response needed no words. The Prototype awoke, dead and silent, alive and full of endless noise. 

Lightning McQueen had never been so drunk in his entire life. He stumbled around the shell of Mater's workshop, uncoordinated, longing to cry. Instead, he leaked wiper fluid like it was the same thing, his hood smearing with the acidic blue liquid. There was no relief. Satiation was a thing of the past: there were some things that even the most elaborate machines could never reproduce.  


"Sally," he cried, "Sal, aw, Sal, I'm sorry... " His sobbing voice was unusually strained with the effort to sound tearful. "I'm such a fucking asshole, Sal, aw…" He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, his gaze fell on a photograph of him and Mater. They were out on one of the bluffs, backlit by blue sky, smiling crazily. Lightning wailed anew. His dear friend. His dear girlfriend. How had everything gone so wrong in such a short period of time? He was shedding pieces of his life like leaves in late fall. He was decaying. He was dying.  


Off-kilter, Lightning backed out of the workshop and into the lot. His gaze was unfocused: the empty cars and their scattered parts were like a crowd of skeletons, staring at him humorously. Won't be long, they seemed to say, won't be long until you're one of us.  


His heart pounded in his chest.  


He envisioned Mater, perched on the landfill just waiting to be doused with gasoline and burnt to a crisp. In Mater's place, he put himself: eyeless, battered, not a thought or a spark of life in two tons of metal and wiring. He saw the town gathered around in mournful silence, all of them struggling to think of him and nothing else, because it would be the last time they could take in his cherry-red chassis. And Sal, absolutely beside herself- would she read his eulogy? Or would a certain burgundy Dodge Charger roll up next to her and say something inexplicably comforting, and they'd drive away together with Sal taking one final, bittersweet look at his shrivelled corpse?  


Lightning screamed. He ratcheted up three gears and hit the gas, tearing around the lot with furious grace. The vision of that charming, seductive muscle car was so absolute in his head, he thought he could see her just beyond the gate, in the corner of his eye.  


"McQueen!"  


Maybe it was more than just a vision.  


Lightning slammed the brakes and whirled around- and yes, there she was. Vic. He narrowed his eyes at her, but she remained impassable.  


She drove up, calm and collected, scanning her eyes over the donut-shaped tire marks.  


"Burning off steam?"  


Lightning snorted. "You've got no idea," he slurred, averting his gaze.  


Vic laughed. "Moonshine, huh? That's bad for your gas tank, you know." She was right beside him. He'd barely even noticed. How'd a muscle car have an engine so quiet?  


"Don't care."  


She shook her hood. "I didn't think you would. Listen, I need to talk to you about Sal."  


"Sally?" The magic word. Lightning snapped upright.  


"I thought that'd get your attention. Come on. I'll tell you on the way." Vic started towards the exit.  


"On the way?" Unconsciously, Lightning found he was already following her.  


She sighed, like the question was a very slight inconvenience. A plane delay of thirty minutes. Storm clouds on a day out.  


"I'm afraid there's no drinking through grief, McQueen. We're going to the junkyard, where your friend is."


	4. AUTOPSY

As the two cars drove through the little town of Radiator Springs, Lightning moving from side to side unpredictably, Vic a smooth and easy extension of the road, her story began out of their tender, vulnerable silence. The entire town was in mourning, locked inside their various domiciles, and the town looked like an abandoned movie set. The sun was beginning to go down behind the red rocks on the horizon. Everything was the color of blush.  


"I'm an engineer. Or, I studied to be an engineer. It doesn't really matter. Sal was working on getting her law degree, and we used to study together. Though, if I'm being honest, we didn't do a whole lot of studying."  


Lightning bumped into the curb. "What… what'd you do instead?"  


"Talked."  


Lightning was too drunk to stifle his sigh of relief. Vic continued:  


"We'd talk about the world, what we wanted to do, what we were afraid of, what it all was supposed to add up to. Y'know, I guess that was the first time anyone'd ever asked me about myself, or what I thought, and it really… it really meant a lot, what Sal saw in me. I didn't come from the best factory," her voice got quieter then, "and you know her. Bright, ambitious, like anyone in a law program, but then on top of that, Sal was kind. What she said to me, she really meant- and she never said anything mean."  


That sounded like her. Lightning felt a hideous pang in his chest and wished that he had brought one of the bottles of moonshine with him to drown it down. Vic's words echoed in his head. Drinking may not be productive, but it certainly felt nice.  


Vic slowed down a little, seemingly lost in thought. "I know what kind of an effect I have on her. She never thought she was all that, and I think… my choices, they make her feel insecure about leaving California. Like she never made it big, and I did. So when I'm around, she gets nervous and excited and well, McQueen, I think she might've made you a little bit jealous."  


"Me?" Lightning ran into a fire hydrant and winced at the dent. "No. Never. Sal's mine, and that's… y'know, that's it."  


"Uh-huh."  


"I mean, it's not like you and her ever… you didn't, you wouldn't... I mean, you didn't fool around. We're… we're probably getting married, y'know."  


"Right. I'm not in town to steal your girlfriend."  


Lightning giggled. His earlier fears seemed silly now. They were just women friends, from college- there was no deep, long-lost love hidden there. He had nothing to worry about, and everything to apologize for- but it was going to be fine. He thought he might even like this guy, with her nice, considerate words, and her gentle, masculine voice.  


"We did fool around once, though." Vic rolled up outside the gates of the junkyard. "Look at that, we're here."  


The mountain of discarded car parts loomed in the darkness like a sleeping monster. The gates, strangely enough, were wide open.  


"What?!" Lightning scrambled to catch up. "What do you mean, you-" she forged ahead, and he had no choice but to follow, pressing through the junk and metal until it ground underneath his wheels. He ignored it- he didn't want to lose sight of her dark red bumper. Her license plate said VICKY with a specialized heart decal on the end, flashing silver-blue in the night.  


"It was only once, it was a long time ago. We used to sleep in the same garage, you know how that is. Intimacy abound," Vic laughed, and Lightning thought it sounded a little cruel. He scowled, revving his alcohol-filled engine to try to catch up with her.  


They barrelled up the mountain of junk, two rumbling bodies in the night.  


"When you say- fooled around," Lightning panted. Vicky slowed down a touch, smirking as he, a trained racecar, struggled to catch up with her.  


"Not as smooth as the tracks you're used to, huh, McQueen?" she teased.  


He gestured his wheel towards her in an 'up yours' motion. Vicky chuckled.  


"When I say fooled around, I'm talking about autobody stuff. Nothing with the tailpipe or anything. Don't tell me you think it's a big deal."  


They arrived at the top of the pile. There, dormant and and twisted and empty, Tow Mater rested- Lightning felt his spirit heave forward.  


"No," he said softly, "I don't think it's a big deal." He felt substantially more sober now.  


Vicky nodded. "Good. You never know how much time you'll have with someone. Anger is such a... " she searched for the word, "... petty thing."  


She was right. Seeing Mater was a stark reminder of how even with their technological advancements, death still existed. How foolish he had been to live carefree and easy, safe and sound inside of himself, arguing and competing and feeling, when the end lingered just beyond a sharp curve, an eroded hill, a rock in the engine.  


"Is that why you brought me up here?"  


"Hm?" Vicky approached the mangled corpse and circled around it.  


Lightning's eyes reflected Mater's empty windshield. "So I could see I'm being ridiculous."  


Vicky nosed Mater's corpse onto its side with her hood. His cadaver fell heavy on the scrap, making Lightning flinch; but worse, so much worse, after the crash had twisted his metal open and split his roof open, the pale body inside was visible now, tossed out onto the pile of junk with the force of Vicky's push. One arm had come away from its brachial-steering lock and, broken in three places, twisted upwards. The rest of him was still hooked up to the inner mechanisms of the Car. It elbowed unnaturally to one side, jutting ribs flashing silver-white in the moonlight.  


For the first time, Lightning McQueen saw his best friend's face. He saw his jaw, his mouth, his uneven teeth all hidden behind the respirator-mic apparatus, the knobs of his spine and the soft, vulnerable flesh of his stomach. Worst of all, he saw his eyes- broken free from the windshield, looking upward in the realization of a horrifying, unknowable truth. They were brown. Like him. Like his moonshine bottles.  


There was a flawed, fragile human body concealed inside every one of them- it was a mercy he'd taken for granted to not be reminded of it.  


It was too much.  


Lightning shuddered and expelled the entire tank of moonshine onto the stray metal and trash. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard Vicky laughing.  


"Oh, boy. Just you wait until you see your girlfriend."  


"What?"  


Lightning raised his dizzy head, just in time to see Vicky brandish something long and black- the next thing he knew, 10,000 volts shot straight through his protective metal organism, down to his skin, rendering him unconscious. Thudding steps-?- in the distance followed him down into darkness, then dissipated. He was in the dark of the mind, his limited sensory awareness diminished even further. Imagination conjured sparks. 

The remnants of a survival instinct made him forget. But even as he drifted away, he held Sally's face in his head, yearning to know she was okay.


	5. AUTOMATION

Sally was his masterpiece. Yes, Dr. Ren mused, The Prototype was thirty feet tall and built from the bodies of nine different cars, and they could cross great distances in seconds and sense metal out from the dirt and crush his every enemy- but there was a delicateness, a grace, that his abominable robot-lover couldn't match in Sally Carrerra.  


She was coming to on a wide steel platform, yet another feature hidden inside his airport hangar-laboratory. It was three hours from Radiator Springs. At some point, it had housed antique airplanes and hosted air shows- big events with hundreds of people and death-defying tricks performed on the face of the sky. But now, it was overrun with grass and the heat rippled off the black tarmac oppressively. Each hangar concealed another one of Dr. Ren's experiments- though this one was the biggest, and for good reason.  


He had used parts from other Porsches, to maintain her smooth, blue exterior, and given her a set of long, double-jointed arms where her front wheels would normally go. On her back wheels, he'd given the former attorney a sweet pair of metal gams, double the length of her body. She was situated at an angle, as if eternally driving up a steep hill. Unlike The Prototype, she had a human core, paired with a customized exterior- but like him, she was now heir to an unbelievable mechanical power.  


"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," she screamed, and her scream was the sound of an air raid siren- the sound of oncoming death, and fear, wrought by technology Man was never meant to have, "what have you done to me?! Oh no, oh no, oh please, no!" Sally brought her long, crane-like arms in front of her face, and flexed her many metal fingers. It horrified her to think of the many cars that this evil vehicle had dragged her, turned to scrap, so that he could use the metal for… for this! She could not feel the air on her skin, but that made her wonder if she had ever felt the air, or if she had known it as a memory, and when she moved, pretended it was there so deftly she had felt it.  


Dr. Ren stood before her, watching with empty, affectionless, admiring eyes. "I've made you more powerful than you could ever have been on your own."  


Sally screamed again: "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA"  


She lunged towards the ambulance, creaking, weight shifting. Dr. Ren shifted into reverse and moved away from her with a smile, as her body tipped forward- her feet, invisible, were sunk into heavy metal cylinders, which in turn were sealed to the platform. Her hands brushed the concrete floor. "Undo this!" she pointed at him. "You monster!"  


He wagged his hood back and forth like he was shaking his head. "Am I a monster? Were they monsters, who made the Cars? The Cars saved millions, Ms. Carrerra. Billions. Or were the monsters those who polluted the air in the first place? Few remember it. The world was all organic: easy to spoil, easy to destroy, easy to kill. Soft flesh and coppery blood. Feathers, fur. Skin! Brain!"  


Sally dug her hands into her ankle restraints, wailing at the futility. "Shut up! Shut up!"  


"They needed it! Needed the fresh air, to fuel the machines, to fuel production. Or perhaps the monsters were the ones who motivated the production in the first place, hm? The profit incentive! The grind. Don't tell me you've never heard of it. You were once a young lawyer daunted by visions of your own success…"  


Her face blanched- as much as metallic blue paint could- and she reeled backwards, balancing unsteadily in place. "How do you know about that?"  


"Vicky told me everything."  


Sally's mouth opened in dismay. "V… Vicky?" Her voice cracked.  


"Yes."  


"How long-- when--"  
"

It's not important. You'll see her soon enough- you can ask her then. Once she and my partner are finished with… Lightning." Dr. Ren's smile was like radar: anticipatory, intelligent, used for evil.  
Sally's anguished scream could be heard for miles. 

"Is that… a tornado warning?" Lightning's head was killing. He felt himself lurch to one side, and then the other, his eyes refusing to open.  


"Air raid siren." Vicky's voice drifted into his semi-consciousness. Anger flooded into him. Vicky. Where was Sally? And- oh, no. Mater. Mater's corpse. Lightning tried in vain to open his eyes, but the darkness remained, and his eyelids stayed shut. He struggled- he did, not the body of the car. His fixed body, wired to each part of the car, where his stomach moved and his lungs breathed, where his hands and legs were restrained and fused to the wheels with wires and rods and hinges, where his eyes were hidden behind an immovable visor- that part of him struggled, fought against the machine he had consented to be placed inside forever. It was the only part that could. His wheels were rigid. His eyes wouldn't open.  


"W-where am I?" Lightning couldn't keep the fear from his voice. He had not stopped bouncing around; he felt nauseous, but there was no fuel in his tank.  


"We're in the hands of the Prototype. Try to relax. Everything will become clear, with time."  


"The Prototype? What?"  


Vicky didn't respond.  


"Dammit, I'm not gonna wait! Tell me, now!" Still, Lightning was met with silence- and then, all the more humiliating, with a tiny chuckle. He howled, "where's Sally? Is she okay? What's going on?! Where are you taking me?!"  


Vicky laughed loud this time. "Sally is better than she's ever been. Just trust me, McQueen. Everything will all be fine." Once again, Lightning felt the electricity shoot through his entire body, felt his consciousness subsiding. "Try to relax," Vicky said again- Lightning mumbled a curse word at her, but he was too far gone for her to be able to tell what it was. The Prototype closed their great fingers around the cars, and continued to lumber across the land, headed for the old airfield.


End file.
